Diagnosing depression in the hospitalized patient with chronic medical illness.

Symptoms useful in diagnosing depression in the medically ill are reviewed. The DSM-III criteria seem best suited for this purpose; of these, the most useful discriminators among patients with concomitant depression and medical illness are the affective/cognitive symptoms. Less useful are vegetative/somatic symptoms, which do, however, support the diagnosis when they are severe, disproportionate to the medical illness, and temporally related to affective/cognitive symptoms.